Podcasts

This week we've got Brian Snow on the show again. Brian had a 34 year career with the NSA in the States -- when he retired just a few years ago he was the technical director of Information Assurance there.

He's joining the show this week to talk about PKI, and specifically, why PKI hasn't taken off like we all thought it would. Brian actually has a pretty decent explanation for why things like federated identity never took off in the early to mid naughties like we all thought it would.

That's after the news.

Also this week we chat with Matt Moynahan, Veracode's chief executive. We're talking to Matt about the testing of applications sold via things like Apple's app store and Google's equivalent. That's our sponsor interview.

Adam Boileau, as usual, is this week's news guest.

Sourcefire partners in the Asia Pacific region have been bombarded with abusive e-mails purporting to come from Ammar Hindi, the company's APAC and Japan managing director.

Hindi isn't sending the mail. The company suspects the messages are the work of a disgruntled ex-employee based in Singapore. "We have strong suspicions who it is, but haven't been able to establish it definitively," a source close to the matter told Risky.Biz. "It was our hope that they'd lose interest and move on, but after every period of quiet, another wave goes off."

The e-mails appear designed to cause embarrassment to Hindi. "Mother f--ker! Wake up your idea and be more productive with more f--king sales order of Sourcefire in the next 30days so that Sourcefire can have a f--king good Q1 2010 under my charge," says of the e-mails, sent from a Gmail account set up in Hindi's name.

"Wake up your f--king idea and focus on f--king Sourcefire sales only or else you are not my f--king good partner for APAC," reads another.

One partner interviewed by Risky.Biz says the e-mails are a particularly bad look for an information security software company. "Because its Sourcefire... it is worse in that they should be more responsible in protecting information," he says. "But at the same time, its only email addresses to partners which are probably available to most staffers. Any disgruntled employee could have easily taken some or all of this info prior to walking into an exit interview or to resign."

The partner expressed surprise that Sourcefire hasn't reached out to those affected to explain the situation. For its part, sources within Sourcefire say they don't want to respond as it may encourage the alleged offender.

All of the e-mails target Hindi, according to the source, and the company is making slow progress in pinning down the alleged offender. "The [legal] tools that are available to us are relatively blunt," the source says.

Impersonation is a form of fraud in many jurisdictions, the source says, but in others the behaviour is harder to pigeonhole into a specific offence.

"John Doe" court actions have been filed against the sender of the e-mails in various jurisdictions, the source says, and the company is working hard to prove the identity of the miscreant. "We'll keep plugging away until we can develop a record and hand it over to the police," the source says.

Until that happens, it seems Sourcefire partners will have to cope with the occasional, expletive-laden, poorly-written rant.

Follow Patrick Gray on Twitter here.

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On this week's show we're having an extended chat with our good mate Greg Shipley.

Greg's best known as the CTO of Chicago-based information security consultancy Neohapsis, and he'll be joining us to talk about what was on the agenda at the RSA conference. Apparently it's cloud, cloud, cloud... but what does that actually mean, mean, mean? Greg will be along soon to discuss, he's always good.

There will be no sponsor interview this week -- the team at Check Point are snowed under at the moment so we just didn't get an interview organised, but that's cool, because it leaves more time for me and Greg to talk about stuff.

Adam Boileau joins us for the news this week.

Risky Business is hosted by the team at Virtual.Offis in Sydney but sponsored, this week, by Tenable Network Security.

This week's feature guest is H D Moore, who'll be joining us to talk about some fun stuff he's been doing with NTP. Believe it or not you can use NTP to do massive recon on the Intertubez. H D has built a database of millions of hosts by querying NTP boxens. It's cool.

Tenable Network Security CEO Ron Gula joins us in this week's sponsor interview, and Adam "Beardy McUNIXguy" Boileau drops in to discuss the week's news.

This is a sponsored podcast. Symantec sponsors the RB2 podcast so once a month we get one of their staff on the line to talk about industry trends, malware... whatever, really!

And today we're speaking with Vincent Weafer, Symantec's director of security response. Regular listeners of Risky.Biz podcasts would have heard me tonking on a LOT about patch management lately, and in particular the moves by large security vendors like McAfee, Trend and Symantec into that space.

McAfee and Trend have licensed technology from BigFix and Symantec is integrating technology from its Altiris acquisition into its endpoint security products.

It's an interesting trend, and one that I personally think will have some meaningful implications for enterprise security. For one, patch management will all of a sudden be a capability of security teams, not just desktop teams.

So I thought I'd talk about this with Vincent, who sheds light on the trend from a vendor perspective. As you'll hear, I also talked malware with Vincent -- everything from the Zues botnet to the media's favourite Aurora. Enjoy!

In this podcast we chat to a solicitor who specialises in IT. His name is Erhan Karabardak and he's with the firm Cooper Mills in Melbourne.

Erhan mostly specialises in technology-related stuff, and I wanted to get his thoughts on this so-called hacking scandal engulfing the corridors of power in New South Wales.

Last week a couple of journalists from the Sydney Morning Herald were given a handy tip -- if they pointed their browsers to nswtransportblueprint.com.au they would find a bunch of documents there that shouldn't have been released yet -- namely, the State Government's transport blueprint.

They went to the site, sure enough the documents were there, they wrote up the story and it ran on page one of last Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald.

The comical twist in all of this is the minister then went out and accused the journalists of hacking into the system to obtain the documents. This is especially funny given the journalists in question are known for being technologically challenged and possessing a fondness for fountain pens.

I thought it would be interesting to discuss this with a solicitor like Erhan. Although the documents were left on a webserver, could it be argued that the journalists had been doing something wrong by accessing them? When is a hack a hack? What if you had to guess a complicated URL through some sort of brute-force attack?

Well as you'll hear, unless you actually have some sort of access control on your data -- like a password, you're up the proverbial creek. I interviewed Erhan yesterday.

This week's edition of Risky Business is brought to you by Kaspersky and hosted by Virtual.Offis.

This week we take a look at patch management and ask why it still sucks. Security professionals have been advising their clients to sort out their patching processes for more than ten years, but it's still at the top of many, many a post-audit report.

We chat to Securosis analyst Rich Mogull about his research on patch management.

In this week's sponsor interview with chat with Kaspersky Labs' Vitaly Kamlyuk about the next generation of ransomware doing the rounds in the Russian Federation. Let's hope it doesn't wind up here!

Adam Boileau, as always, is this week's news guest.

In this instalment of RB2 we'll be hearing from Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan, who heads up High Tech and Child Protection Operations, for the AFP.

A recent report in the Sydney Morning Herald detailed changes to Australian law that would allow the Australian Federal Police to physically destroy computers if they contain encrypted data the police can't unlock.

The story also talked about further changes to laws that would stiffen penalties for suspects who refuse to hand over encryption keys and passwords.

Anyway, it all sounded pretty extreme and drew a pretty adverse reaction from Adam Boileau, our regular news guest on the Risky Business podcast, so I thought I'd get Neil on the line and ask him about these changes, instead of just assuming the worst.

Neil joined me by phone on Monday for this interview!

On this week's show we're joined by a very special guest -- Brian Snow.

Until his recent retirement, Brian was the technical director of information assurance for the United States National Security Agency. So, in other words he knows a few things about information security and in this week's show we cover a bunch of stuff with him -- everything from Google's recent trouble in China to e-voting, to cyrpto trust models and more.

That's after the news.

In this week's sponsor interview Veracode's Tyler Shields joins us to chat about the Blackberry proof of concept spyware he's created... apparently it's still not too hard to get custom malware installed on to the Blackberry and Tyler will tell us all about it!

On this week's show we'll be checking the news with Adam Boileau, as we always do, then we're going to have a chat with Brett Moore of Insomnia Security.

A bug Brett found featured in the most recent patch Tuesday release, so we thought we'd get him on the line and get the latest scuttlebut from the world of vulnerability research. Where are the new bugs popping up? What are the trends? What can we expect?

That's after the news.

We stick with the vulnerabilities theme in this week's sponsor interview with Fred Borjesson of Check Point Software here in Australia. We're speaking to Fred about software vendors' rather annoying habit of sitting on bugs.

That IE6 bug that popped every man and his dog over the southern summer had been reported to Microsoft a long time before those attacks -- should we be angry that it took that long? Or would the attackers just found another bug Microsoft didn't know about for their attacks?